Chile's Law of Transparency and Access to Public information, which took effect last April, is helping national and international organizations that are seeking information about people who disappeared during the military dictatorship. Those people include U.S. citizen Boris Weisfeiler, Inter Press Service reports (in Spanish).
Judith Torrea, a Spanish-born reporter, has covered U.S.–Mexico border issues such as the drug trade, immigration, and border policy for nine years. She was attracted to Ciudad Juárez since her first visit 12 years ago, despite its naming by a Mexican watchdog group as the world’s most violent city.
In a diplomatic offensive against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Foreign Minister Jaime Bermúdez warned that the diffusion of videos by the rebel group represent an "apology for organized crime and terrorism," the AFP news service and Radio Caracol report (in Spanish).
Don’t expect relations between Hugo Chávez and the U.S. media to improve in 2010. Venezuela’s government long ago declared war on “media terrorism,” its term for news organizations that criticize Chávez from within and outside the country. Chávez recently slammed the U.S. magazine Newsweek for its predictions that in 2010 Chávez faces another coup and that his mentor Fidel Castro will die this year in Cuba.
Ecuador's 14 indigenous nationalities will be able to present proposals that will help them get low-frequency radio permits for at least one citizen-based, "community radio" station in each nation, El Telégrafo newspaper reports. Guidelines should be available in two weeks.
A military policeman (Carabinero) will stand trial for the assault in May 2008 of Victor Salas, a correspondent for Spain's EFE news agency, The Santiago Times reports. Salas was covering a protest outside Chile's parliament in Valparaiso when he was struck in the head by a mounted police officer. He later lost his vision in one eye.
To investigate the unpunished assassination of Guillermo Cano, who was shot by hitmen 23 years ago in Bogotá outside the offices of his family's newspaper, El Espectador, a team of Colombian journalists have produced this excellent multimedia report: 23 Years of Impunity and Silence.
Some 40 reporters held a vigil outside the attorney general's office in Los Mochis, Sinaloa (NW Mexico), insisting that authorities quicken their response to the abduction of José Luis Romero, crime reporter for the Línea Directa radio station. A state official acknowledged there were no advances in the case, Línea Directa and La Jornada report.
Around 200,000 netizens have signed an online petition calling CNN to apologize for its breaking news coverage this Sunday of the conclusion of a controversial rape trial in Steubenville, Ohio. The TV network's story has come under intense fire this week for focusing its attention and sympathies on the two teenage football stars who were found guilty of sexually assaulting a 16-year-old girl last summer, while omitting any mention of what the ruling meant for the victim.
Netizens call on CNN to apologize for sympathetic coverage of teenagers found guilty of rape
The case of the Uruguayan site Amenaza Roboto is remarkable. Within a year, the multimedia platform that covers science and technology produced in Latin America for a Spanish-speaking audience has paid all its bills.
To face the many challenges that currently exist in Venezuela, many journalistic media have found themselves in need of forming alliances to continue reporting and investigating.